At Latymer Upper School he was an outstanding fast medium bowler of away-swing and captained the school XI successfully. He went on to study general arts at Durham, and played for the university. He joined Middlesex in 1980 and played for them for 12 seasons, culminating in his benefit season of 1991. He subsequently spent two seasons playing for Durham. Hughes also played for Northern Transvaal in South Africa during the winter of 1982–83, and the Grafton United Cricket Club in Auckland in the 1987-1988 season.
Journalism
Hughes retired in 1993 to concentrate on a writing career which had begun as a player for The Independent with the widely acclaimed Cricketer's Diary. In 1994 he joined The Daily Telegraph as a columnist and became the BBC's roving reporter on Test matches. He has worked as a journalist for The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, for The Times and for the BBC. He has written nine books, including the autobiographical A Lot of Hard Yakka, Yakking Around the World, JargonbustingMorning Everyone: An Ashes Odyssey, And God Created Cricket, and Who wants to be a batsman? He is perhaps best known for his work as The Analyst on Channel 4's cricket coverage, winning the Royal Television Society's Sports pundit of the Year award in 2002, where he spent matches in a VT trailer, watching replays and drawing viewers' attention to particular details. Channel 4's cricket coverage won 28 awards in its seven-year span, including six Baftas. He was a commentator/analyst on Cricket on Five with Sir Geoffrey Boycott and Mark Nicholas. He originally signed up for the programme from 2006 to 2010 when the deal expired, with the ECB. On England's December 2007Test match tour of Sri Lanka he was a summariser on the BBC's Test Match Special, and a commentator for the ODI series against the West Indies in 2009. In 2010 he again joined the Test MatchSpecial team commentating on the tour of Bangladesh and the One Day Series against Australia. He has commentated on many home and overseas series for the BBC since and was the analyst for ITV4's coverage of the 2010 Indian Premier League up to the 2015 Indian Premier League. Until 2018 he was The Analyst on Channel 5's evening highlights programme when he was replaced by Alison Mitchell who was not able to do the analysis. He commentates on BBC radio and BT Sport and writes for The Sunday Times''. He also produced the analysis segments for the international coverage of the 2019 ICC World Cup including the final.
Mobile application
To bring together content in a digital form previously only available in his books and to consolidate his news, views and insights, prior to the Cricket World Cup he launched the Cricket Analyst mobile application on the Apple iPhone/iPad and Google Android. devices in partnership with Anton Christodoulou.
